We’re living in the #enshittocene, in which the forces of enshittification are turning everything from our cars to our streaming services to our dishwashers into thoroughly enshittifified piles of shit. Call it the Great Enshittening:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions
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Enshittification has complex underlying dynamics and a reliable procession of stages, but the effect is quite straightforward: things are enshittified when they become worse for the people who use them and the suppliers who makes them, but nevertheless, the users keep using and the suppliers keep supplying.
There are four forces that stand in the way of enshittification, and as each of these forces grows weaker, enshittification proliferates.
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The first and most important of these constraints is #competition. Capitalists claim to love competition because it keeps firms sharp: they must constantly find ways to improve products and cut costs or be swept away by a superior alternative. There’s a degree of truth here, but that’s not the whole story.
For one thing, competition can “improve” things that we would rather see abolished.
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Critics of the #GDPR, the EU’s landmark privacy law, often point to the devastation that enforcing privacy law had on the European #AdTech industry, driving small firms out of business. But these firms were the most egregious privacy offenders, because they had the least to lose, lacking the dominant position of US-based Big Tech surveillance companies.
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Having the least to lose, they were the most reckless with their privacy invasions - but they were also the least equipped to pay expensive enablers from giant corporate law firms to hold off European enforcers, and so they were obliterated. The resulting lack of competition is fine, as far as privacy goes: we don’t want competition in the field of “who is most efficient at violating our human rights”:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible
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But there’s another benefit to competition: disorganization. A sector with hundreds of medium-sized, competing companies is a squabbling mob, incapable of agreeing on the site for an annual meeting. An industry dominated by a handful of firms is a cartel, handily capable of presenting a unified front to policy makers, and their commercial coziness provides them with vast war-chests they can use to suborn governments and capture their regulators:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/
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Competition is the first constraint. When there’s competition, corporate managers fear that you will respond to enshittification by defecting to a rival, costing them money. They don’t care about your satisfaction, but they do care about your money, and competition hitches their ability to satisfy you to their ability to get paid by you.
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Competition has been circling the drain for 40 years, as the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, hatched by Reagan’s court sorcerers at the University of Chicago School of Economics, took hold. This theory insists that monopolies are evidence of “efficiency” - if everyone shops at one store, that’s evidence that it’s the best store, not evidence that they’re cheating.
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For 40 years, we’ve allowed companies to violate antitrust law by merging with major competitors, acquiring fledgling rivals, and using investor cash to sell below cost so that no one else can enter the market. This has produced the inbred industrial hulks of today, with five or fewer firms dominating everything from eyeglasses to banking, sea freight to professional wrestling:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
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The endless and continuous weakening of competition has emboldened corporate enshittifiers, who operate on the logic of Lily Tomlin in her role as an AT&T spokeswoman: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company”:
https://vimeo.com/355556831
But the drawdown of competition has also enabled regulatory capture, by converting cutthroat adversaries to kissing cousins.
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